Doubts on both sides of the Atlantic

Europe is worried about George Bush’s America—and vice versa

MIGHT George Bush yet succeed where Europe's leaders have not, in forging a common foreign policy for the European Union? Having settled little of their own business at their Stockholm summit (see article), over dinner the EU 15 decided to step in where America still hesitates to tread: their president for this half-year, Sweden's prime minister, Goran Persson, together with the Union's two top foreign-policy officials, Javier Solana and Chris Patten, will meet North Korea's Kim Jong Il sometime in May. The aim, said Mr Persson, is “to express support for the [peace] process started by the South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung.” The point, said Sweden's foreign minister, Anna Lindh, is that Europeans are getting twitchy at Mr Bush's more “hardline” approach towards North Korea. Europe, she added, “must step in.”

Such twitchiness is not confined to Mr Bush's Korea policy. Europeans expected the smack of firmer leadership from the new administration in Washington, but have been taken aback that so far it seems all smack and little leadership. They listen nervously as Mr Bush talks more of threats than of diplomatic opportunities, whether the issue is North Korea, missile defences, relations with Russia or arms sales to Taiwan. He had rattled his NATO allies even before he took office by allowing Condoleezza Rice, now his national security adviser, to think aloud about pulling American troops out of the Balkans. He has since torn up his promise to limit greenhouse gases, an issue dear to greener European hearts. And where Mr Clinton was deeply engaged—in talks with North Korea, mediation in the Middle East and peace-making in Northern Ireland—Mr Bush has deliberately stepped back.

But does that necessarily mean that Europeans can—or should—step in? A common foreign policy based only on their differences with America would serve European leaders ill, and they know it.

“This is the hour of Europe, not the hour of the Americans,” declared Luxembourg's foreign minister almost exactly ten years ago, launching a notoriously futile mission to mediate in the Balkans. The minutes ticked away to years as the Bosnian crisis claimed many thousands of lives, got Europeans themselves at cross-purposes and all but ruptured the transatlantic alliance.

Ten years on, the EU has started to craft some common foreign policies. But its leaders are also being careful not to pick unnecessary fights with the United States. For example, although some, notably France's President Jacques Chirac, remain deeply sceptical about Mr Bush's plans for new missile defences, believing they could diminish Europe's security rather than enhance it, all now accept that a bust-up within the alliance over the issue would do even greater harm all round. Russia, which had been attempting to cosy up to Europeans in the hope of presenting a hostile common front to America, was told to back off.

Once Mr Bush has more of his new team in place, other foreign-policy differences may start to seem more apparent than real. America's switch to promoting “smart” sanctions against Iraq—ones that tighten controls on military imports and oil smuggling, while relaxing restrictions on other goods—is already helping to heal a rift that has split France and Britain as much as Europe and America. In the Middle East, Europeans recognise that, whatever their irritation at having to write most of the cheques, America is the outsider that counts. Their worry now is just that a too hands-off Bush administration will lose what few opportunities there are to get talks going again between Israel and the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, faced with yet another Balkan crisis, this time in Macedonia, the Europeans and Americans are working closely together, both diplomatically and militarily. While Balkan policy, like everything else, is up for review by the new administration, Europeans were greatly reassured recently when Colin Powell, Mr Bush's secretary of state, pledged that Americans and Europeans would go “in together and out together” in their Balkan peacekeeping mission. This comradeship could, however, be sorely tested if Macedonia, like Bosnia and Kosovo before it, were plunged into bloody civil war—especially if it claimed American peacekeepers' lives.

The Balkans aside, the trickiest transatlantic differences over the next two years could well be over the EU's plan to set up its own rapid-reaction force by 2003, and over NATO's plans for further enlargement. Some European officials worry that, to the extent that Mr Bush welcomes a greater European defence effort, it will be so that he can turn his attention and military resources away from Europe to Asia, as his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, implied last week. That might not bother France, which wants Europe to be more “autonomous” in defence; Britain and Germany, however, want to keep the transatlantic link strong. Conscious of the difficulty of finding the cash for really useful soldiers who would be available to NATO as well as the EU, their officials tend to worry that failure to put in the extra defence effort promised will produce recriminations that could damage NATO.

Just as troubling to the Europeans is what they fear may be a big row before next year's NATO summit over which countries, if any, should now be invited in as new recruits. Opinion within Europe is divided, though most countries would probably prefer no new members, since it is proving expensive enough to assimilate Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

The biggest difficulty will be over Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Russia is hostile to any of its former territories joining NATO; some on America's Republican right seem equally determined to bring the Balts in, precisely in order to spite the Russians. Europeans are not sure what to worry about most: another great Russia-NATO bust-up or the possibility that the United States and Russia could cut a deal over their heads to finesse their differences over other issues, including missile defences.

And where does the EU's Korean initiative fit into all this? The idea has been in the works for some time, in the hope of encouraging the northern Mr Kim to make a promised but much delayed visit to South Korea. North Korea now has diplomatic relations with all EU governments except France and Ireland. Mr Persson and his team can help keep the diplomatic traffic moving at a time when America is still thinking through its North Korean policy.

And the bit of grandstanding at the EU summit? Neither North Korea nor South Korea has any illusions that the Europeans have influence, or indeed till now much interest, in Korean affairs. Although the EU takes part in the consortium that is keeping a freeze on North Korea's nuclear programme by supplying two less proliferation-prone western reactors, its financial contribution to the project is minuscule. When it comes to forging a genuine foreign policy for Europe in the wider world, words not deeds still come easiest and cheapest.